Category Archives: Economics

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have produced a Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity. There is much to agree with in it but at least one part is thoroughly misconceived, which is the attack on libertarianism. Such an attack is a strange thing to read in such a manifesto, for if any ideology seems a product […]

The blogger Zman provides a very useful summary of the dissident right: If you were trying to reduce the main points of the Dissident Right with a few bullet points, it would be: The people in charge have dangerous fantasies about the future of society and the nature of man The mass media is just propaganda for those fantasies […]

This is based on a comment I made here. The success of Israel and Hungary in putting up border barriers has been cited as evidence in favour of President Trump’s proposed Mexican border wall. A counter-argument raised against such citing is that those walls are much smaller than the Trump proposal. It is true that the US-Mexican border is 3,201km long, […]

In his discussion with anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman, evolutionary psychologist and YouTuber Gad Saad offers (at 8.48) the following: By the way, in terms of generative grammar, whenever when I see the word ‘post’ before anything then that raises a flag that it’s bullshit. So post = bullshit; postmodernism, postcolonialism, post-structuralism. So, maybe Chomsky can one day weigh in on why the introduction of post implies that we are […]

So, y’all would have noticed that I don’t post much on this blog any more, but I still occasionally blog over at Opinions on High, the Melbourne Law School blog covering the decisions of the High Court of Australia, where I am one of the editors (along with Professor Jeremy Gans). I’ve just written a […]

I’m not usually given to quoting Bill Lawry around these parts, but the last week has been somewhat…busy. For good reason, though. First, the Cato Institute published the entirety of my ‘Author’s Note’ from Kingdom of the Wicked, where – in an attempt to avoid having my writing horribly misinterpreted – I set out how I’d […]

Recently read the following comment: A second example i’ll give is Black Lives Matter. One is labeled racist/white supremacist/white nationalist/nazi if you say “no, All Lives Matter.” But the problem isn’t a devaluation or disrespect to the grievance (at least in all instances as it is implied) — it’s the selection of the name. … In […]

I find the persistence of belief in socialism surprising (an example here), particularly given that Venezuela and North Korea both, in their different ways, display, yet again, the disastrous results in poverty, human misery and tyranny of “actually existing socialism”: that is, state domination of the economy. The lesson of Venezuela is, if anything, even stronger, as it is an […]

This is based on a comment I made here. If turning points in asset prices could be reliably predicted, they wouldn’t happen (since no none would buy at the “about to be seriously undercut” price). The “bubble” folk don’t seem to understand that calling it a “bubble”: (1) entails not knowing when the turning point will […]

Ron Unz has produced two pieces of statistical analysis on ethnicity and crime in the US providing evidence that there is no distinctive tendency among Hispanics to have a higher crime rate, once other factors are controlled for, while there is clearly a much higher crime rate among African-Americans. This being an American piece, anything to do with […]